Syncing with upstream keeps Fedora current. This is part of regular package maintenance.

Syncing with upstream keeps Fedora current. This is part of regular package maintenance.

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* With every new release of Boost come new components and libraries. For instance, Boost 1.45 brings [http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_45_0/libs/msm/index.html MSM] and [http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_45_0/libs/polygon/index.html Polygon].

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* With every new release of Boost come new components and libraries. For instance, Boost 1.46 brings [http://www.boost.org/libs/icl/index.html ICL], and Boost 1.45 had already brought [http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_45_0/libs/msm/index.html MSM] and [http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_45_0/libs/polygon/index.html Polygon].

* Moreover, the existing components and libraries are enhanced with new features and bug fixes. For instance, the [http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_45_0/?view=category_Math Boost.Math components] have now become better than the [http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/ GSL] for support to [http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_45_0/libs/math/doc/sf_and_dist/html/index.html statistical analysis].

* Moreover, the existing components and libraries are enhanced with new features and bug fixes. For instance, the [http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_45_0/?view=category_Math Boost.Math components] have now become better than the [http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/ GSL] for support to [http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_45_0/libs/math/doc/sf_and_dist/html/index.html statistical analysis].

Detailed Description

That feature aims at synchronising the top of the Fedora tree with the current Boost upstream release. The current Fedora release is boost-1.44.0, folded into devel August 2010.

As of Fedora 13, the canonical sources used for the package switched from the official Boost release (with BJam build) to an alternate repository (with CMake build, for boost-1.41.0). That alternate repository seems to be no longer actively maintained.
boost-1.41.0 has been delivered from that (now deprecated) Boost-CMake repository (hosted on Gitorious), where the code base had slightly diverged from upstream.

From Fedora 14, boost-1.44.0 has been rebased on upstream, with a mere patch implementing CMake support. Moreover, there is a new Git repository reflecting those changes, hosted on GitHub (and cloned on Gitorious). That repository relies on the Ryppl project, created and maintained by two talented Boost developers, namely Eric Niebler and Dave Abrahams.

The objective is now to keep delivering the latest stable Boost release for each new Fedora and RedHat releases.

Scope

Upstream sources for Boost releases are evaluated, along with alternate repositories. One is selected, packaged according to Fedora package conventions and cognizant of existing package practices, tested, evaluated, and then built in Koji. This is then pushed to fedora devel. Dependencies are rebuilt. The unicorns are once again happy, and can go back to drinking champagne and complaining about slow build times.

How To Test

No special hardware is needed.

Testing of the Boost packages themselves requires the host system to have the boost-test package installed. Testing can then be enabled at package build time by passing --with tests. Note that that testing phase should be done only once per type of architecture and distribution version.

Once the Boost packages have been built and checked according to the previous step, testing simply consists in installing them on Fedora 15 and checking that it does not break any other package dependency.

Expected results: all the packages depending on Boost (for instance, hugin, gnash, pingus, kdeedu or k3d) should work properly on Fedora 15.

User Experience

Expected to remain largely the same.

Dependencies

There are a large number of dependencies for the boost package in fedora. Here is a non-exhaustive list.